Thursday, November 19, 2015

Scientists Forced to Realize That Irrational Hatred of Fat is Ridiculous

I think the most ridiculous thing about this article is the first five words.

Around a dozen years ago, researchers noticed that some patients with chronic conditions such as heart disease fared better than others. This should have been encouraging news, perhaps a clue to future treatments. Instead, researchers were baffled. Because the factor that seemed to be protecting these patients was fat: They were all overweight or mildly obese.

Adozen years ago. So for around 12 years, we could have been working with more accurate information about health and a ton of fat hatred could have been prevented, but that didn't happen because...?

Researchers immediately began trying to explain this “obesity paradox”—or, more often, to explain it away. Carl Lavie, a cardiologist in Jefferson, Louisiana, was one of the first clinicians to describe the paradox. It took him over a year to find a journal that would publish his findings. “People thought, ‘This can’t be true. There’s got to be something wrong with their data’,” he told Quartz.

For 12 years, researchers spent their time trying to discredit all the studies supporting the idea that being fat can be healthier than being thin. For 12 years, doctors kept refusing to treat fat people until they lost weight, dismissing their concerns and symptoms as being a result of their weight. For 12 years, people kept working on the false assumption that fat = unhealthy and thin = healthy and using that to justify their fat hatred, which fuels self-hatred in fat people and eating disorders and general self-harm through diets that never work.

Flegal found the lowest mortality rates among people in the overweight to mildly obese categories. It’s true that these groups are slightly more likely to suffer from heart disease and some other life-threatening conditions in the first place. But many factors influence the likelihood of a person getting heart disease. And a strong link between weight and disease only emerges among people with severe obesity. So taken at face value, the results seemed to be showing that a little extra weight is genuinely beneficial.

The entire article just undoes every common assumption about weight and health. I just have one addition. Even if someone is fat enough to be at risk of heart problems or whatever, still leave them the fuck alone.

I mean, I understand why everyone involved in the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry wants to crush any evidence that being fat isn't horrible in every conceivable way. But why is everyone else so invested in clinging to a narrative that is clearly untrue?

“People are furiously looking for some way to make this not the case,” says Deb Burgard, a clinical psychologist in Los Altos, California who treats eating disorders. “And I think that bears some comment. Theoretically we should be very happy to find out that people aren’t dying the way we thought they were going to, that there’s not going to be this terrible outcome. That people at higher weights are going to be OK.”